it is what it is, but it ain't what you think

Entropy Road

entropy road

time slips from great to good, or from terrible to wors’ning down that entropic road we pay our tollpaved hot toward cold never endings

that god, what god? the mirror asks, tone optimistic, while condescendinglife’s urge to organize is quite strongmake amends, then share the booty’s blending

time slips from me to us, then “you and i” to loving our valentine then seeks it’s mateand on goes that prolific downward sending

that god, what god? the reflection quests, as the last winter snow’s still clinging that Holonic symbol, our family crestbears our family blood from each upbringing

the urge to mate is as strong to hate, to blend, then split the winnings our Junior a mixed-sum of boththen adds each new moment’s vendings

time drives us from then to now, our final destination reaching tho’ next can never touch our lips
it’s law, Relativity speaking

that god, what god? the question begs, who should i tell him’s asking?our urge to love and to proliferate…

life’s sentence, and time’s unmasking

-30-

2nd law of thermodynamics

A Critique by Jendi Reiter

I was lucky to have had this poem selected for review by The Winning Writers, a respected site for amatuer poets with top writers as owners who run the site. Jendi Reiter is an excellent and respected poet in her own right.

Critique by Jendi Reiter

The form of this month’s provocative poem, “Entropy Road”, embodies its theme of order struggling to remain distinct from chaos. The headlong rush of syllables in the longer lines and the fragmentary, zigzag presentation of the poem’s argument give the poem a restless energy. Meanwhile, the “-ing” rhymes repeating in the first and third lines of every stanza, the refrain “that god, what god?” and the semi-regular meter attempt to corral that energy within a poetic framework.

Making the rhyming words present participles (verb forms, or nouns derived from them, ending in “-ing”) was an inspired choice. These words describe action in progress. Just as the stability that the narrator seeks is always a moving target, the concepts on which he depends to convey this argument will not stay put. Each rhyming line also ends on an unstressed syllable, which gives the poem an open-ended, unfinished cadence.

Entropy, of course, refers to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which basically states that the energy levels in an isolated system will tend toward equilibrium. Entropy has sometimes been described as a measurement of the disorder or randomness within a system. In the poem, as in popular usage, it symbolizes universal mortality and dissolution. If evolution drives organic life to ever-higher levels of self-organizing complexity, entropy is the opposite force, that which pulls down and breaks apart complex systems into nature’s simplest building blocks. It means that all material energy will ultimately spend itself and be unrecoverable.

As self-aware components of this dying system, how can we find the motivation to go on living, loving, procreating, and planning for the future? Which will win, our philosophical sense of futility or the inward compulsion to survive and create?

Perhaps no one wrote about entropy in this sense more powerfully than the 20th-century British poet Philip Larkin. A sample poem can be found here.

Larkin generally settles the question on the side of death, but Adams disagrees: “the urge to love is as strong to hate”. The life force has a fighting chance. Yet it is hampered by our inability to articulate a reason for hope. “that god, what god? the mirror asks, tone optimistic, while condescending”.Existentialist philosophers looked to the self to create meaning in a universe made absurd by death’s finality. The poem suggests that this answer is insufficient. The individual is merely part of the closed entropic system. He cannot inject it with new energy to reverse its decay.

There are positive, hopeful moments in “Entropy Road” but they come from outside philosophy and science. Whatever the intellect may say, instinct confirms that human connection and creativity are not futile. “time slips from me to us or, from you and i to loving/our valentine then seeks its mate/goes the prolific downward sending”. The opaque last phrase may have been chosen mainly to fit the rhyme scheme, but its vagueness felicitously makes it more symbolic than a specific description would have been. It called to my mind both the release of seed in copulation and the movement of the child through the birth canal, but other associations are possible, such as rains watering the earth to bring forth crops, or the descent of angels.

The birth of a child does seem like a miraculous creation ex nihilo, the opposite of entropy. First there were two, now there are three. “Holonic” is a word coined by 20th-century philosopher Arthur Koestler to express the observation that entities in biological and social systems are always interdependent, never completely self-sufficient units. This law of interconnection and symbiosis contrasts with entropy’s pull toward disconnection and stasis.

“our junior is the sum of both/but adds ‘new’ moment’s vendings”. Is “new” in quotes because the narrator’s intellectual side reminds him that this is not a real solution to the problem? On the human scale, parenthood may feel like a triumph over mortality, but on the level of the cosmos, it does not stave off the decay of the whole system, looked at in purely materialistic terms.

The poem ends by leaving the question open, a humility that rings true. Adams does not claim to decide whether the emotional or the scientific perspective on the human condition is correct. He suggests that it is really a question about the nature of the self, or perhaps its very existence. “that god, what god? the question begs, and who should i tell him’s asking?/an urge to love and proliferate…”

If pressed to define the self, Adams would emphasize the impulse to love and create, however blind that impulse is, over the scientific description of the individual as a collection of atoms arranged in a temporary order. He chooses the insider’s perspective over the outsider’s, life as it feels to us, rather than life as the scientists say it is. (After all, they too are part of the flawed system, not truly above it.) Yet the final line, “life’s sentence, and time’s unmasking”, expresses the fear that some trans-human perspective would prove us wrong; the joke of the universe is on us, after all. The dilemma brings us to the limits of reason, where some have found faith, and others merely the willpower to live without it.